According to NetCraft's records, the whistle-blowing website is mirroring the diplomatic cables on Amazon's US-based EC2 service and France-based servers operated by French ISP Octopuce. The main WikiLeaks site is mirrored on Ireland-based Amazon servers.

WikiLeaks also uses a US-based domain name registrar (Dynadot) and a US-based DNS service (EveryDNS).

In theory, if the US government decides that WikiLeaks has broken the law in publishing federal intelligence data, it could move to have WikiLeaks booted from such US-based servers. But WikiLeaks could simply fall back on its core servers — presumably still hosted by "bulletproof" Swedish hosting outfit PRQ — and the feds would take a PR hit.

Clearly, this is how WikiLeaks reads the situation, as it continues to use Amazon's US-based "cloud" service to accomodate extra demand for its data.

In an added twist, the whistle-blower is also using software from Seattle-based outfit Tableau to visually map its trove of leaked diplomatic cables. Tableau grew out of a project run by the US Department of Defense.

In August, the Defense Department said that it had launched a criminal probe to find out how confidential federal documents were obtained by WikiLeaks, and today, CNet reports, US Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that an investigation is ongoing. "To the extent that we can find anybody who was involved in the breaking of American law and who has put at risk the assets and the people that I have described, they will be held responsible," Holder said. "They will be held accountable." ®